On December 2, the new and increasingly influential Children's Data Network partnered with the California Child Welfare Indicators Project to release a slew of studies showing that one in seven of all California babies born in 2006 and 2007 had been reported for abuse or neglect by age five.

We must all become more aware of how to better protect our children and how to recognize and report abuse. We cannot save them all, but maybe we can open our eyes just a little more today to the realities and suffering of children in our midst.

No matter what your position is on the highly complex and deeply personal subject of abortion, I just have to know: Why do we seem to care so much about fetuses but then not so much after the big birth event?

Flight, fight or freeze hormones work really well to help us accelerate when we're being chased by a vicious dog with big teeth, fight when we're cornered, or turn to stone and stop breathing to escape detection by a predator. But they become toxic when they're turned on for too long.

If you were Dr. Vincent Felitti, chief of Kaiser Permanente's revolutionary Department of Preventive Medicine in San Diego, CA, whom would you pick as your first audience to reveal your stunning findings that many morbidly obese people in an obesity clinic had been sexually abused during their childhood?